Thursday, August 12th, 2010
The Kids Are All Right
If I didn’t know who my father was—and it turned out to be Mark Ruffalo—I’d be positively psyched. And so are the beneficiaries of this fate, if only for awhile, in Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right. On her 18th birthday, at her 15-year-old brother’s insistence, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) calls the sperm bank they [...]
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Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
A Nightmare on Elm Street
There’s no dishonor in trying to improve upon Wes Craven’s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street; cloning it is another matter. It’s a form of ablation—using Freddy Krueger’s claws as surgical tools. The innards from the 1984 original have been removed, and placed, intact, in the gloomy frames that are meant to signify the present. [...]
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Thursday, January 14th, 2010
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
I slipped into a 6:40 show of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at 6:50, hoping to have only missed some previews; instead, I apparently missed out on half the plot. Unless the director, Terry Gilliam, has devised a newfangled approach to storytelling that condenses an hour or more of exposition into a five-minute intro, I [...]
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Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
Some people have the worst luck. Others are invented to have the worst luck. Such is the genesis of the title character in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. From that title alone, you know how importantly bad her luck is; the title needs a colonic. Produced under the aegis of Oprah Winfrey [...]
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Thursday, November 26th, 2009
An Education
In the past few weeks, I’ve reviewed four movies set in the 1960s. (One can see the autobiographical filmmakers’ distress: Starting January 1st, it’ll be accurate to say that the ’60s were a whopping 50 years in the past. Perhaps we’re experiencing a collective baby-boomer mid-century crisis.) The best of the lot is An Education, [...]